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Comcast ruling victory in short term, raises questions for future

From the paper today:

By Cecilia Kang and Frank Ahrens

At first glance, Tuesday's federal court ruling on Comcast looked like a clean win for the cable giant and for competitors including Time Warner and AT&T. The court, after all, ruled that Comcast could regulate high-speed Internet traffic over its own system and that a company that wanted to push its content through Comcast's pipelines could not.

But the ruling might be only be the beginning of a long campaign between Internet service providers and companies such as Skype, Google and Microsoft. The outcome is far from certain.

At issue is the wonky-sounding phrase "net neutrality." In 2008, the Federal Communications Commission told Comcast and other big high-speed Internet companies that they must treat content that flows through their pipelines equally, whether it's digitally lightweight e-mail or hefty movie files, by pushing it all through at the same speed.

Comcast complained that certain kinds of Internet traffic are so heavy that they slow down the entire system. Essentially, Comcast wanted to be able to enforce speed limits on its information highway, moving the big, traffic-clogging Internet traffic into a slower lane. Comcast sued the FCC, and Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with Comcast.

Again, falsehoods and slanted reporting from Cecilia Kang, Google's reporter at the post. Kang writes, "The court, after all, ruled that Comcast could regulate high-speed Internet traffic over its own system and that a company that wanted to push its content through Comcast's pipelines could not." This is completely untrue. In fact, the proposed FCC rules specifically exempted Google -- Kang's advertiser -- from any regulation at all. This despite the fact that Google has the third largest Internet backbone in the world -- larger than those of nearly all ISPs. This is why Google paid (and is paying) millions of dollars to lobby for them.

Ms. Kang, likewise, is obviously motivated by the Googlebucks she receives in every paycheck to lobby for Google every day in the paper.

Ah. Post a critique of Ms. Kang's journalism or point out her ethical breaches, and immediately she (or a confederate; it's hard to tell which due to the pseudonym) accuses the poster of everything from racism to child molestation to halitosis. Obviously, these criticisms must hit home, or the response would not be so vehement.

See? The poster above has just proven my point. Post a legitimate critique of a provably false and biased article, and be slandered by "AmyBandini" (who appears to be either Ms. Kang herself or a confederate). It's sad to see that the state of discourse in DC has descended to this level.